"A lot of you don't know what being here with a brand takes. Sorry, I'm not political," comedian Chris Burns deadpanned to his more than 443,000 followers on Instagram. "Yeah, I posted about boycotting Starbucks, but that was like two months ago."
Hitzig warned that OpenAI's reported exploration of advertising inside ChatGPT risks repeating what she views as social media's central error: optimizing for engagement at scale. ChatGPT, she wrote, now contains an unprecedented "archive of human candor," with users sharing everything from medical fears to relationship struggles and career anxieties. Building an advertising business on top of that data, she argued, could create incentives to subtly shape user behavior in ways "we don't have the tools to understand, let alone prevent."
Part of the answer lies in the visceral nature of the game. Unlike chess, football is physical to the point of absurdity. Grown adults in body armor crash into each other over what is essentially a leather egg. There's drama in every play. You don't need a PhD in physics to appreciate a one-handed catch while somersaulting over a defender like a caffeinated acrobat.
He has, as one advertising lackey puts it, gotten rich selling people air that's fresher' than the stinky stuff outside. If a recent proliferation of real-life courses, books and online search interest is anything to go by, the act of getting that air into one's lungs is also now commodified. Online and in-person breathwork sessions now abound, some charging hundreds of dollars to teach participants a skill most have already acquired as a prerequisite for life: how to breathe.
When hot honey started popping up on restaurant menus about five years ago drizzled over pizza perhaps, or used as a glaze for meat or halloumi it seemed novel; something unusual and exciting to try. Word soon got out, particularly among gen Z, about its swicy (sweet and spicy) appeal, and the product has gone a bit crazy over the last couple of years, according to Laurence Edwards, owner of Black Mountain Honey, which has seen its hot honey sales shoot up.
Step one, effective immediately, is to make roughly 400 carefully picked patents available online for a free two-year trial period. Specifically, any company that wants to try out one of the 400 technologies in its own research, development, and products can get what's called a Commercial Evaluation License (CEL) without the usual fee. Those 400 technologies- everything from a Navy-developed drone tracking system to novel Army mortar fuses - were chosen out of the thousands of possibilities by Michael's staff.
Zipline, a drone delivery and logistics startup, has raised more than $600 million in new funding, boosting its valuation to $7.6 billion, as it expands commercial deployments. The firm's fundraising round included backing from Valor Equity Partners and participation from investors such as Tiger Global, Fidelity Management and Research Company and Baillie Gifford. The new valuation, compared with a 2024 fundraising round at $5 billion, is a sign of confidence in the startup's ability to scale and commercialize its operations.
Well, "new" is a stretch, considering what he's asking for is essentially another fucking remake of the original Pokémon Red and games. But having been in the series' vicinity for almost 30 years, I know that this is the type of artless pitch lapsed and casual fans would happily gobble down like Moomoo Milk.
It's funny to think of people getting up in arms about any capitalist appropriation of "Santa Claus," a 100-percent made-up corporate advertising mascot bearing the same relationship to the Christian historical figure of Saint Nicholas that Hannibal Lecter has to the murdered prison guard whose sliced-off face he wore as a disguise to escape confinement. This is a figure that exists pretty much explicitly to obfuscate the religious meaning of Christmas in favor of a Satanic monthlong veneration of shopping and consumerism.
Though its origins are religious, you probably know the advent calendar as a humble grocery-store product that features chocolates hidden behind 24 perforated cardboard doors. That sugary countdown to Christmas dates back to the 1950s when the first chocolate versions came on the scene. Cadbury started mass marketing them in 1971 as tools to engage children with the Christian tradition of Advent, says Canadian marketing expert Robert Warren, who closely follows Christmas trends.
The United States was chosen, the columnist George Vecsey wrote in the New York Times in 1994, because of all the money to be made here, not because of any soccer prowess. Our country has been rented as a giant stadium and hotel and television studio. Nobody could seriously doubt that. The USA had played in only two World Cups since the second world war and hadn't had a national professional league for a decade.
Flying often first requires crawling, in a car, in slow or stopped traffic that eventually treats you to a view of airplanes soaring away from your ground-anchored vehicular misery. After decades of hype about flying cars, the past 10 years have seen a pivot to something of a car-plane hybrid: an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft that provides taxi-like service.
Yoga's introduction to the West began in the late 1800s, but it wasn't until the early 1990s that yoga began to gain in pop culture popularity. Suddenly, yoga was everywhere. Celebrities including Sting (featured on a YJ cover in December 1995), Madonna, and Oprah touted the benefits of the practice; magazines began to feature the practice, noting its benefits in health and fitness columns; and it started to show up in movies and sitcoms.
Did you rush off to the gym to lift weights then to a pilates class to keep you healthy for ever? Did you remember your MHT (menopause hormone therapy the now widely accepted term for HRT) pill, patch, gel, pessary, suppository or cream, trusting your GP or private clinic to be prescribing for you and only you, grateful that finally medication has made a difference for you?
This is the market laid bare, with all of its champagne, ludicrous outfits and obscene excess on brazen display for anyone willing to fork out a wodge on a ticket. That's what reviews of Frieze generally complain about, all the greedy capitalistic knives being stabbed into the heart of their beloved, pure art. But Frieze, and the more refined Frieze Masters, isn't really about art.
In the UK, a graphene-enhanced, low-carbon concrete was laid at a Northumbrian Water site in July, developed by the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre (GEIC) at the University of Manchester and Cemex UK. The material when it came out of academia was hyped to death but the challenge is going from lab to fab, says Ben Jensen, the chief executive of 2D Photonics, a startup spun out from the University of Cambridge that makes graphene-based photonic technology for datacentres.
I had high hopes for this album, because Swift was finally returning to the producers she used for 1989 and Reputation. I've listened to her music since we were both in high school, and my body remembers the anticipation it felt before some of her better albums, and the ecstasy of having that anticipation rewarded with an LP full of bangers.
The recent stomp clap discourse sparked a lot of conversations about how the divisive 2010s subgenre grew out of 2000s indie-folk, and the evolution (and "gentrification") of the latter is actually something that Stereogum managing editor Chris DeVille tackles in his upcoming book Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion, which comes out this Tuesday (8/26) via St. Martin's Press.
Commercializing inventions requires not only capital but also an emotional investment by the inventors. Visionaries pay for that ambition with insomnia, time away from family, and job insecurity.
Parks are open to everyone, except during festivals, and they're essential for building community through egalitarian access. Events companies often exploit these spaces, causing long-term damage.
